Soil and Water Management Strategies Mitigating Abiotic Stress in Horticulture Crops

Horticulture crops are potentially heavy yielders, where marketable quality traits are of huge commercial importance, coupled with their post-harvest life. Hence, sustaining their performance across diversified agroclimates and agro-pedological conditions offers a formidable challenge amid the current climate conundrum. Among these, abiotic stress in the form of waterlogging/submergence, soil water deficit stress, multiple nutrient stress, soil degradation seasonality, loss of soil organic matter vis-a-vis horticulture-based land use and water uses, current disagreement debate between researchers on inorganic versus organic growing of horticulture crops, all either singly or collectively, have exposed horticulture crops to such unwarranted stress, thereby sub-optimum quality production has become a common sight, especially for these crops marketed afresh.

Improving post-harvest life of horticulture crops is still a neglected area of research on account disparity between market practices involving fresh fruit market versus value-added packaged or processed crop products. Regardless of any such excellent research in post-harvest management, consumers ' preference towards fresh crops will continue to dominate, regardless of any price consideration. Role of soil fertility coupled with elevated plant nutrition managed through soil and water by mitigating different abiotic stress will throw open some new insights (e.g. nutrient types across crop phenology, plant nutrition triggered plant immunity against diseases, to cite a few ) towards better production sustainability. The research topic is supposed to provide the current trends of research and gaps in this area, as a collection of articles.

This important research topic is floated to achieve goals like I. Morphological, physiological/biochemical, and molecular signaling in response to abiotic stress and management strategies; II. Agronomic response of soil and water management optimizing quality production, III. Soil and plant microbial pool of nutrients in response to alleviating abiotic stress; and IV. Connecting post-harvest life with improved soil health and plant nutrition upon mitigation of abiotic stress.

Researchers engaged in soil and water management, dedicating to abiotic stress alleviation to optimise the performance of horticulture crops (open field and protected conditions) are entitled for submission of manuscripts under this research topic. Different themes of this research topic that will be covered are: use of inorganic fertilizers balancing the site specific multiple nutrient constraints retrofitting microbial inoculants inimproving nutrient-use-efficiency;susbstituting the proportion of inorganic fertilizers organic composts/manures, and biofertilizers; cover cropping and green manuring for soil health resilience integrating soil-plant health management chars as an soil ameliorant to improve the utilization efficacy of applied nutrients; crop-phenology-based fertigation; biofertigation ( integrating microbial inoculants and water soluble fertilizers ); intervention of soil organic management in moderating the accumulation of heavy metals role of silicon and nickel in abiotic stress management mycorrhizal interventions in addressing abiotic stress; integrated management of soil-water together to develop a comprehensive crop production system. Researchers are encouraged to submit their work.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Fertility constraints, quality yield, microbial shifts, nutrient pool, post-harvest life, plant nutrition, response signals. rhizopshere properties

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